Illustration by The Forward Not long after the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000, I became active in a Jewish-Palestinian political movement called Ta’ayush, which conducts non-violent direct action against Israel’s military siege of the West Bank and Gaza. Its objective isn’t merely to protest against Israel’s violation of human rights but to ...

Photo by Ben Stansall/AFP Starting on Thursday, December 28, spontaneous demonstrations broke out in different towns and cities across Iran. The protests broke out over economic issues such as high inflation and high youth unemployment, with the trigger being the sudden hike in the price of eggs and chicken. The protesters, however, soon took up ...

PHOTOS: U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaugural parade makes its way through Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2017, just before the stuff hit the fan and everything went to hell in a handbasket. (Photo: United States Navy.) Below: President Trump, former president Barack Obama, the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and former Australian PM and ...

Photo by gnuckx Part I – The Inevitable Apartheid Nation We know where Zionism has taken Israel. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 led the way. In that imperial and colonial document, the British promised the World Zionist Organization a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine. They did so, as Edward Said put it, in “flat disregard ...

Photo by Jonny White Imagine a natural disaster in Israel, after which city officials demand that victims sign a form swearing never to boycott Iceland before they can receive aid. In their distress, people who never dreamed of boycotting Iceland will sign anything. Now you have them hating that Nordic island nation. That ridiculous scenario is exactly ...

The coming months mark the centennial of Palestine’s forcible incorporation into the British Empire. In November 1917, British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour declared his government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”; in December, Jerusalem fell to British troops. One hundred years later, the effects of these ...

Photo from thenation.com.pk Egypt’s enthusiasm to arbitrate between feuding Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, is not the outcome of a sudden awakening of conscience. Cairo has, in fact, played a destructive role in manipulating Palestinian division to its favor, while keeping the Rafah border crossing under lock and key. However, the Egyptian leadership is clearly ...

Photo by zeevveez As the Jewish High Holiday season moves in, Israel is getting set to welcome a throng of religious visitors – evangelical Christians. Thousands will pour in from more than 80 countries to the streets of Jerusalem in early October for an annual march celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Jewish festival ...

The June 5 decision by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt to suspend diplomatic ties with Qatar has sent shockwaves through the Middle East. The ensuing blockade shut down much of the Gulf’s maritime and land trade with Qatar, provoking fears that the tiny state would soon face food shortages. Major ...

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who exposed the Mai Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004, is probably the most influential journalist of the modern era, with the possible exception of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the pair who exposed Watergate. ...

Up to June 1967, a border separated Jews living in Israel and Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza. The Six Day War, which occurred exactly fifty years ago, erased that line. Israel has been occupying these territories ever since. This has been the source of an endless conflict between Jews and Arabs. Who ...

Photo by Guido van Nispen This article aims to challenge the rather widely accepted claim that the nature of Zionist settler colonization is exceptional and even “defies appeal to any precedent that can usefully be invoked as to its evolution and eventual revolution. My challenge will focus on Moshé Machover’s 2016 article, “The decolonization of ...

Cui bono – “who benefits” – is the first question an experienced detective asks when investigating a crime. Since I was a detective myself for a short time in my youth, I know the meaning. Often, the first and obvious suspicion is false. You ask yourself “cui bono”, and another suspect, who you did not ...

The United States has placed, and continues to place a great deal of geopolitical importance on the Middle East. The problem is that, as the record shows, everything they touch turns to ash or is reborn as a even greater threat to America and American interests world wide. Recent events have not done much ...

Responding to the US airstrikes on Syria, Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev declared in a Facebook post: “On the verge of a military clash with Russia”. Justifying the airstrikes, PM Justin Trudeau said Assad’s “use of chemical weapons and the crimes the Syrian regime has committed against its own people cannot be ignored.” The post Dmitry ...

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) is offering two workshops that may benefit Winnipeggers interested in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and seeking more effective methods to discuss it with family and friends. Called Beyond Polarized Kvetching: Speaking Effectively on Israel/Palestine, the sessions will be held at the drop-in room at Winnipeg’s WestEnd Commons (641 St. Matthews Avenue), in ...

PHOTOS: Austrian police and Syrian refugees crowd a train platform in Vienna on Sept. 4, 2015 (photo by Josh Zakary). Below: U.S. President Donald Trump (photo by Gage Skidmore) and a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey in 2016 (European Parliament photos). Canadians should be deeply concerned about stated plans by the Trump Regime in the ...

Syrian refugee children at a half-built apartment block near Reyfoun in Lebanon, close to the border with Syria, give the peace sign. • Photo by Trocaire The enormity, complexity and fall-out of the Syrian war calls for urgent attention. Current events in Aleppo bring to the fore the unreliability of information and dichotomous political positions ...

Photo by Thierry Ehrmann Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on ...

Photo by Cindy Boyce Winnipeg, Nov. 9, 2016: Israeli filmmaker and correspondent for the Real News Network Lia Tarachansky screened and discussed the motivation for and the making of her documentary film On the Side of the Road. The former West Bank settler examines Israelis’ unwillingness and/or inability to look at the impact of the ...

Photo by Montecruz Foto Media coverage of world affairs mostly focuses on Ottawa/Washington’s perspective. While the dominant media is blatant in its subservience to Canadian/Western power, even independent media is often afraid to challenge the foreign policy status quo. A recent Canadaland podcast simultaneously highlighted anti-Palestinian media bias and the fear liberal journalists’ face in ...

Photo by Kristoffer Trolle Nazareth. Is Israel on the verge of civil war, as a growing number of Israeli commentators suggest, with its Jewish population deeply riven over the future of the occupation? On one side is a new peace movement, Decision at 50, stuffed with former political and security leaders. Ehud Barak, a previous ...

Photo by Harry Pockets On one level, an incendiary video posted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend looked suspiciously like an own goal. In it, Netanyahu argues that a Palestinian demand to dismantle Jewish settlements amounts to the “ethnic cleansing” of some 650,000 Jews living in the occupied territories in violation of ...

Photo by Adhi Rachdian In early spring, with snow still clotted thick on the ground, my grandmother dies in my parents’ home. We wash her naked body the next day in the basement morgue of the local Scarborough mosque, my hands closer to her skin than they’d ever been in life. There is a gaping ...